


Silence Followed, and We Wept

by the_aleator



Series: Tomorrow, If You Remember Anything [1]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Angst, Battle, Canon-Typical Violence, Christmas, Friendship, Gen, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Korean War, The Colonel's Three Wars, War is hell, Whump, World War I, World War II, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2019-09-27 15:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17164871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_aleator/pseuds/the_aleator
Summary: Hawkeye Pierce's first Christmas in Korea. Or, how he spent the night in the Colonel’s tent, asked a question, and got more of an answer than he bargained for.





	1. As If A Door Were Shut

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas! (NB: This has no beta, and will be edited over the coming days). Basic MASH spoilers and speculation. MASH’s timeline is unsolvable as usual. In this, I take the later-season approach that Potter & BJ arrive sometime in late 1950.

Hawkeye’s about one minute from diving into his coffee cup, or better still, sending his fingers for a swim in the thick, undrinkable but _hot_ coffee, when BJ plunks down next to him. The Mess Tent’s pretty full for a late Thursday evening, but most of the people in here are trying to catch up on meals from the last O.R. shift.

 “I thought you were sleeping.” Hawkeye said, not looking up, tracing a circle around the mug.

 “I thought you were eating. But your fingers are trying to commit suicide, not your stomach.” BJ demurred, resting his chin on his hand.

 “My stomach has given up hope.” Hawkeye griped back. 

 “The matter of the thing,” BJ agreed. “And I was sleeping, until our stove was requisitioned for purposes, or purposes unknown.”

 “Again! My chilblains are going to get chilblains. I’ll freeze straight to my cot—”

 “—a Hawk-sicle—” BJ interjected, helpfully.

 “a Hawksicle, thank you, and you’ll have to ship me back home through Siberia with the post-mark: contents frozen, do not heat.” Hawkeye’s eyes took on a devious glint, and he elbowed BJ. “My Dad’ll need a bigger freezer.”

 “Do not open, son inside.”

 “Lay me in a snowbank and think of Maine!”  Hawkeye crowed, thinking about the possibilities. Then he sobered, looking at his coffee cup, steaming in the cold air of the mess tent. “Do you know, BJ—” he said, and then broke off.

 “What, Hawk?”

 Hawkeye can feel BJ’s blue eyes, bloodshot but earnest, looking at him from the side, but he rests his eyes low, doesn’t look to the right, just thinking. There’s a moment between admitting what he really thinks about things and the joke he could make to cover his thoughts which is always a temptation. Hawkeye the trickster, Hawkeye the jokester, Hawkeye the man who has been pushed too far, lost too much, found humor only a defense mechanism instead of fun.

 Did the war do it, or just accelerate the process?

 “ _INCOMING WOUNDED—ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO TRIAGE—TWO DAYS TO CHRISTMAS AND THIS IS NOT A SNOWBALL FIGHT, FOLKS.”_

 “The war calls.” BJ said, standing up.

 “Yeah.” Hawkeye breathed, putting his coffee cup down, and hightailing it out of the Mess.

  *

Night comes on fast in Maine, in the wintertime.

 Once, when Hawkeye was ten or eleven, he had taken it into his head to go for an adventure in the woods before dinner. And he had had his adventure climbing over the frozen brook, investigating deer tracks, listening to the sounds of wolves howling in the distance, and then being hungry, decided to go home for dinner. The darkness of sundown found him lost, no longer on adventure in the woods.

 No one who grows up in Maine is a stranger to the cold, or to the snow that seeps through your boot seams, to the chill wind that steals your breath from your very lungs. Or the pitch black of the woods, at night under a waning moon, with clouds covering the stars, when the only thing darker is the cold of the night coming on.

 He was just a kid but the thing is, and he remembers it vividly, the way the crunch of the snow felt beneath his boots when his feet were numb, the sharp push of the branches on his wet and frozen jacket and hat, and the terrible, growing numbness inside of himself, as he looked in every direction and saw no light, no house near, no one coming to save him, nothing but the growing certainty that he would die alone in the woods of cold.

 In the next moment, he had crested the hill and seen the distant lights from the front room pealing out to the snow. He had sobbed a little with relief, and let his terror show on his face when his father had scooped him up off the front porch, wet frozen clothes and all and stripped him in front of the roaring fire, and carried him to his bed, piled high with blankets and warm from his fireplace. He had been warmed all the way through to next winter, and the next. But he had kept that tiny sliver of self-knowledge tucked somewhere behind his heart, that dark grasping hand that had laid cold fingers on his soul and said, _death_.

 *

“You took our stove.” Hawkeye groused, pulling his surgical top on over his head with a slight shiver. Even with his leanness, you could only really fit one sweater underneath these things. He’d had to leave his other two and jacket on the hook.

 “Yes.” The Colonel acknowledged, agreeably, scrubbing over at the sink. “And you’ll get it back, tonight.”

 “We have not yet begun to fight, and fight we will, for our stove, our lives, and my name of Franklin,” Hawkeye countered, bending over to untie his boots. BJ tapped him on the shoulder.

 “Hawkeye, he’s agreeing with you.” BJ turned to Potter, giving a mild shrug. “The cold’s gone to his head.”

 “I heard that, Californian.”

 “Settle down, boys.” Potter wafted his hands, leaning against the O.R. doorframe, half-resting, half-standing. “Right now, there’s no room at the inn. Our last wave of casualties was as many patients as we had beds, and that was only twelve hours ago. We’ve evac-ed, we’ve called around, but the Swamp just became Post-OP 4 for our latest patients. Right now we’re trying to evac more of our patients out of here, but it’s not looking good.”

 “Where’s the 8063rd?” Hawkeye wanted to know, stepping into his scrub pants.

 “They’re in worst shape than we are. Radar’s on the line, but Bethlehem’s looking full up.”

 “You look tired, Colonel.” BJ offered from the scrub sink, looking over his shoulder at the shorter, older man.

 “We’re all tired, and that’s a fact.” Potter sighed, took a deep breath. The wrinkles under his eyes looked deeper than normal, his gaze staring on right through the both of them, but his hands were scrubbed, sterile, held aloft in the air, and absolutely steady. “But the biggest problem is this cold. Our own men are coming in with frostbite. I’m having Burns double up the enlisted men per tent, the nurses as well, and you two jokers are bunking with me tonight. If we get enough bodies in each tent, they might be a little warmer.”

 “If we see our beds tonight.” Hawkeye retorted sardonically, tying his strings off.

 “What about Burns?” BJ asked.

 “He can sleep in the stable.” The Colonel paused, leaned against the door. “On second thought, the Lord was born in a stable, and I don’t like the implications of that for Burns.” Potter shook his head, chuckled, then the smile fixed on his face like the humor had gone out of it for him. “Let’s get to work, boys.”

 “Five dollars says he’ll be sleeping in sin with Margaret.” Hawkeye whispered to BJ, raising his eyebrows demonstratively. Hawkeye had very expressive eyebrows, once even Fr. Mulcahy had pegged his eyebrows as obscenely telegraphing.

 “No bet. Burning the money would at least keep me warm.” BJ said back, raising his mask and tying the strings.

 Hawkeye shivered, dramatically, and then stalked into the O.R.

  *

“Just don’t cut my boots off.” Hawkeye growled, not opening his eyes, pushing someone—BJ, by the length and shape of the long forearm bones—to the other side of the O.R. bench. “I sold my soul for these boots. _And_ to the Army.”

 “Why would I want to cut your boots off?” BJ wanted to know, not genuinely, but with the kind of studied insouciance that said he was willing to play along. Good old BJ, just like an actor on a stage.

 “To tell why my feet are numb.” Hawkeye said back, mumbling. Even his lips felt tired. And his feet were numb, but with the cold, the tiredness, or doing eighteen hours in surgery, he couldn’t tell. Maybe it was better that way, not to know.

 “I thought it was your head that was numb.”

 “No, that’s Frank’s.” It was the ending shot to all their little joke-plays, the jab at Frank. Particularly since, as like most times in surgery, he had been too tired to finish out their last O.R. push.

 The O.R. door swung open, and Colonel Potter’s even, measured footfalls walked into the scrub room. Hawkeye liked to listen to the colonel’s tread—it had a kind of order and easy rhythm that was calming about it. Army boots had a very distinctive sound about them, they sounded heavy, even against regular dirt. You could tell a lot about a person from the sound of their stride—Frank Burns made a sort of wish-washy noise, because he tended to drag his heels, not scuffing, nothing so definitive, just a soft scrape-scrape, just like the man. Margaret sounded like a brass drum when she was angry, stomping down her whole foot all at once. BJ rocked on his feet, rolling from the outside to the inside.

 “Officially, that was our eighty-sixth patient,” the Colonel’s voice sounded like the gravel end of an organ. “Unofficially, that’s damn good work, boys.”

 “Finest kind.” Hawkeye murmured, seeing the stream of bodies passing before his eyes again, with the kind of weariness that came from seeing the same stream, over and over and over again.

 “Thanks, colonel.” BJ said, the words coming out slowly and quietly, almost as if he were half asleep.

 Hawkeye opened his eyes to a familiar scene, BJ sitting next to him, neck flung back and head resting against the wall of the O.R., already drifting into sleep, Potter pulling off his surgical cap, looking down at the both of them with something that might be just a hint of approval curving the right edge of his mouth. I’ve caught him out, Hawkeye thought, so now he’ll pretend to be twice as gruff to make up for it. Time for some command, with a side of bravado.

 “Hunnicutt, I don’t want to see you for eight hours. Go get a feedbag and some shut-eye. Pierce, you’re on in Post-OP.” The colonel held up a hand, foreseeing Hawkeye’s need to complain. “I know, I know but there’s at least one of Burns’ patients from last night—took a load of shrapnel in his belly—that I want you to go over.”

 Under a lesser man, Hawkeye might have balked, but he knew, after forty-eight hour surgical marathons and weeks of constant wounded, that the colonel worked just as hard as he did, if not more. He wouldn’t want to be in command of this lot at all, much less for two months.

 “With a fine tooth comb, colonel.” Hawkeye promised, trying to eke out the energy to get up. He elbowed BJ, on purpose, not hard, just enough to get him up and moving. BJ shouldered him out of the way, still with his eyes shut. Hawkeye gave him a push back.

 “This bench is too soft.” BJ complained, standing up right and stretching his shoulders.

 “What are you, Goldilocks—"

 “They always are.” The Colonel agreed, buttoning up his fatigues. Hawkeye shut his mouth, considering.

It was not even too much work to find a joke in the colonel’s sincerity, but like Radar, there was something there that was too good to spoil.  “BJ, food and sleep, in that order. You’ll relieve Hawkeye at midnight.”

 “Sir, yes, sir.” They chorused together, BJ moving towards the door, Hawkeye still in his slump on the bench but operating together as if they’d planned it. Synchronicity in distress, Hawkeye mused, this is your love in war. He doesn’t care to examine that thought too closely. Love in war, war in love, the distinctions seem to blur.

 “If only you meant it.” The colonel only sounded disgusted, Hawkeye knew, but is inwardly pleased.  Hawkeye doesn’t want to examine that too closely either—he thought he’d only known his Dad that well, once.

 It haunts him, like the birches bent under ice in the winter’s sun, startling into flame, that these people shine in the darkness of this war.

 If something good, he thought, then stopped, seeing the outline of the Swamp in his mind, filled with wounded soldiers, the caravans of displaced Koreans, women and children, moving South away from the shelling, the inexorable press of time on his father’s face, somewhere over the sea—if _anything_ good, he thought, fiercely.                                                                             

And with that, he goes to work.

 *

 The Pierces of Maine came from a long line of men, and women, who had settled the harsh and unforgiving landscape of New England seacoast long before the country had even had a name. His forebears had endured centuries worth of winter, waves, and work. It took a certain kind of immovable will, formidable vision, and obsession, to the point of insanity.

 Hawkeye was no exception.

 His feet might be numb, his hands might be red and swollen, chapped with cold, and there might be a stabbing headache behind his eyes, but there was his sworn duty— _all measures to the sick—_ and he would do it, or die trying.

 He’d thought that an impossible promise once.

  _Dear Dad_ , he composed mentally, _if I am dead, or alive, whichever comes first,_

_when they ship me from this place –if they ship me from this place—_

_bury me next to Granddad Nathaniel, in the family plot._

  _And let me sleep_.

 *

  He’s dog-tired and the eight hours ought to slog by, but they don’t.

 He circled the Post-OP wards like a hound on a scent. Post-OP 1, the real postoperative ward, but what was real to a homeless MASH unit that packed its bags and moved once a month?, was the warmest and best lit, and also where the worst of the causalities were recovering. He headed there first. Some of the patients were left over from yesterday, or was it the day before, he wondered. No point trying to figure out what day it was, tomorrow would come soon enough.

 The wood of the door was frozen even under his gloved hand, and he touched it only long enough to push the door open and shut it smartly behind him. The warm air of the ward was enough to make his eyes water, and he crossed to the stove in the corner with a sigh of relief. There was no appreciation like numbness.

 Private Williams, A. was the patient that Burns had operated on, and the colonel was right. His condition wasn’t great. His pulse was slow, his blood pressure could use improvement, his temperature was high and there was drainage from his wound. Hawkeye pulled his glove off to pull the blanket back, letting his breath out in a hiss when he saw the sweat beading on the private’s chest and felt the heat aching in his frozen fingers.

 “Kellye,” he called, taking the chart hanging at the end of the bed and noting the current orders for penicillin. “Keep an eye on Williams here, if his condition hasn’t changed in two hours, I want to know, stat. I’ll come back to Post-OP once I’m done checking on the other wounded.” He lowered his voice, speaking more reflectively to himself than to the nurse beside him. “Either we’ve missed shrapnel in this kid’s gut, or he’s got one heck of an infection.”

 He pulled the glove back on, tucked his hat more securely down around his ears, and went out back into the coldness of Korea.

 *

 The colonel, Hawkeye reflected as he ducked into the Officer’s club, was nearly always right. He finds he misses Henry more and less than he thought he would. He’s fond of Henry, of course, but there’s a relief in having Potter standing at their backs. It’s not even that he knows how to cut red-tape while elbow deep in some kid’s chest, or that he’s as sharp as his scalpel and knows all the tricks, but that he’s seen it all before.

 There’s something there to lean on, stronger than the war that surrounds them every day.

 Henry didn’t have that, he was as uncertain as the rest of them, and that’s the double-edge to Hawkeye’s grief. At least Henry was as unwilling as the rest of them.

 This is the colonel’s third war. And that, he still can’t understand. He’s still trying to figure Potter out.

 He’s short, wiry and balding, but he’s got the composure of a monk, the authority of a judge, and the humor of a vaudeville comedian. The folksy expressions and rustic vocabulary came straight off a farmer’s potato truck, but he sews wounds like a master tailor stitching.

 Tough as old nails but tender—

 “And he’s a colonel,” Hawkeye mock-debated to himself, checking the warmth and blood response on the toes above the bandage. “Those things don’t go together.”

 The Officer’s Club is packed with patients tightly enough that he must turn sideways to get by some of them in the corner.

 They are as tight as sardines in here, packed wound by wound, almost like a slaughterhouse—except here, at least, there are beds and not hooks.  Some of the boys under their pile of olive drab blankets look pale enough to be drained of blood—some of them have come wounded off the line, marched or waited in the cold for hours, long enough to get borderline hypothermia and frostbite.

 In Korea, it’s too cold to snow. They’d hit freezing ten degrees ago and the mercury is still plummeting. And the pushes towards the Christmas truce were fierce, as if to make up for ground about to be lost. He’d spent more time in surgery this week than out of it, and he feels that frozen hand on his back, uncomfortable close, resting just below his scapular.

 The patient whose chest he’s examining is cold, too, it’s not just his numb hands. There’s a peculiar sensation to numb fingers touching things, you feel the pressure and the gross block-iness of something else pushing on your flesh, but you don’t feel the sharpness or the edges to things.

 He pulled the pile of olive-green blankets up, and steps back. The patient, the kid he reminds himself, is already covered in four blankets, and he’s cold. It’s warmer in the Officer’s Club than being outside, in the shelter out of the freezing wind and off the frozen ground, and its warmer with all these bodies in the room, but it’s still too cold for a man coming off shock, major surgery, anesthesia, and painkillers.

 “Bigelow.” He said, side-shuffling a bed, automatically scanning: left chest wound, tight bandage, easy breathing by sight, sound, flesh cranially and caudally pink to the abdominals and pectorals. Not one he did, must be either BJ or the Colonel. “Look, have we got any more blankets?”

 “Sorry, Hawkeye,” Bigelow’s mouth is tight: she’s probably cold too under her parka, she’s a slight woman, prone to poor circulation in her hands and feet. “They’re wearing them all already.”

 “Well, go over to the supply tent and get some more.” His voice is rising in the empty space of the Officer’s club, and Hawkeye knows that the anger at Bigelow isn’t justified—it’s the Army, it’s always the Army—but he almost can’t help it. “I’ll stay here—these kids aren’t warm enough. We aren’t going to lose a patient because we haven’t got enough blankets.”

 Bigelow’s eyes are intent on him, and he backs down a little. He knows he sounds tired, and angry, and maybe even a little defeated.

 “Look, just go see what you can do. See if anyone has any to spare, and if you can’t find any, take the ones from my bunk.”

 “I’ll see what I can do, Hawkeye.”

 No one will, of course, and they’ll grunt and they'll groan, but somehow, Bigelow will come back with an armful of blankets. No one will admit what they’ve done either, until they show up with mild frostbite in their toes. If it were possible to love this place and hate it at the same time, Hawkeye would have it down to an art.

 He pitched his voice to carry to Bigelow’s back as she walks briskly to the door.

 “Tell them thanks, Bigelow.”

 Her look, as she turned around briefly, is curious. It’s unfamiliar to him, or rather, he recognizes the look of a woman softening, but doesn’t fully understand _why_ in this situation. She’s out the door in the next minute, in a draft of below-zero wind.

 “This place,” he said meditatively to the patient asleep next to him, pulling open the pajama top, watching the chest rise and fall in the unconscious movement of breathing, “this place,” he repeats, heavy with the weight of it.

 *

 He opens Williams up again at a quarter to nine.

 It takes more than two hours to fish out four pieces of shrapnel, two hiding under the liver, one lodged under the back side of the heart, and a stray piece in the chest wall. There are bleeders to tie off, and Williams almost crashes twice on the table. His blood pressure’s low, his pulse is faint, but all that ought to improve, if Hawkeye’s caught it all in time.

 If.

 Of course, all that would be a moot question if Frank were more than a warm body standing at an operating table. As it is, sometimes Frank is actually less trouble than he’s worth.

 The problem is, Frank likes rules, and straight little lines, and narrow corridors of approach. It makes him decent at dealing with the basic, easy surgeries where nothing unexpected happens, and nothing beyond basic surgery needs to be done. But shake him out of that rut and he falls to pieces easier than an intern. Worse, though, is that he doesn’t care, he gives up in the second between a man living and a man dying.

 And that, Hawkeye can’t abide.

 He’s spent two hours fishing metal out of a boy’s body so that he’ll live, because Frank can’t look beyond the blunt end of his own nose.

 “Take the blankets off my cot,” Hawkeye sing-songed to himself, stepping into the shower stall. “Bigelow should have taken the blankets off Frank’s bed, forget that, she should’ve have taken Frank’s bed.” He perked up, and raising his head, thought beyond the boundaries of the shower tent in his mind. If Bigelow took Frank’s cot, and he took the cot next-door, well, then they could be cold together. He pulled the shower cord, shut his eyes peremptorily, and drew a deep breath.

 “Warm together,” Hawkeye corrected himself, shook his black hair like a dog, rushed into the shower spray, and let out a low yowl. Even if you are covered in blood and sweat, it’s hard to rush into a cold shower when the temperature outside is cold enough to freeze your hair straight to your cot. But he’s a doctor, and he needs to be clean, so he soaps in fifteen and a half seconds, and bears the spray again.

 “Warm, warm, warm.” He hummed under his breath, banging his hand on the beam below the shower handle when he lets go too late. Good thing he doesn’t have a heart condition, or else his draft board never would’ve taken him. Hawkeye dressed quickly enough in his clean fatigues, sweater, sweater, sweater, bathrobe, parka and hat that he’s not actually dry before he gets dressed. He takes more care toweling his feet and stuffing them in new old socks before pulling on his boots. Feet go first is the old Pierce adage.

 If his father were here, he’d scold him for going wet out in the cold, but there isn’t really another option here. Their towels are the size of postage stamps, the shower tents as cold as an ice house, and even a warmish shower is too much to hope for at an hour to midnight.

  Of course, his father would also frown on seeing patients half-dressed, unshaven, and without tying a tie. He can picture his father’s face, blue eyes piercing, looking over his book from his armchair near the fire, raising one silver eyebrow, and saying, in his low baritone,

 “And _where_ are you going, dressed like that?”

 It was like clockwork, watching his father come back from a two-a.m. birthing call, or a three-a.m. pneumonia patient, dressed in a full three-piece suit, a double-Windsor in his tie, getting out of the car as if he’d just come from church, the sole concession to the hour and weather being a heavy wool overcoat or a pair of boots.

 His father would be horrified at the conditions here, appalled at the indifference to life.

 Hawkeye reminds himself that, often, oftener on nights like these.

 *

 In the last half an hour of his shift, he checked up on Williams again, made brief stops through all four of the Post-Ops, and met BJ coming down the compound to relieve him with three soldiers trailing behind him.

 “Who’re the strays?” He’s too dull to think of anything snappy.

 “Came in off the line.” BJ responded, something flashing in his dark blue eyes. He makes an abortive movement toward Hawkeye, then raised his shoulders, as if bracing against the cold, unbuttoned the middle of his parka, and pulled out a wax paper packet.

 Hawkeye mimed clapping, his fingers too cold to actually clap together.

 “Thank you, maestro.” He intoned gravely, stuffing the packet under his arm. “Something the wife picked up at home?”

 “Only if the wife is Klinger.” BJ demurred, then took a step closer to Hawkeye. “Look, these guys need beds for the night, and I’ve given them ours.”

 “Ours?” Hawkeye echoed, feeling the beginnings of a familiar, dark anger.

 “Ours—well, mine, yours and Frank’s. And if by beds you mean cots. And if by night you mean whatever comes after this.” BJ’s face is very earnest, and seems very young, set in this certainty that whatever the cost, he’s doing what’s right.

 “My bed.” Hawkeye’s not angry, he realized that in a flash of inspiration. He’s furious. What right does BJ have to give away his cot, leave him to fend for himself, leave his friend out in the cold, without so much as a by your leave? They’d run out of cots before they’d run out of blankets, and that had been halfway through his shift, but that doesn’t give BJ the right to just _commandeer_ his bed.

 “Just look at them, Hawkeye.” BJ’s plea is quiet, intense and so very earnest that Hawkeye stalls, stalls enough to look. There’s an older man, a sergeant, who has taken a position in front of the other two boys. He’s of middle height, middle age, middle looks, he might be any man in this man’s army. The only thing he can see over his shoulders is two thin faces surrounded by olive-drab, with big eyes and white cheeks, white with frostbite, and not yet old enough to shave.

 “Okay, okay.” He buckled, patting at BJ’s forearm roughly. There’s too much furtive hope in all the eyes looking at him, BJ’s worst of all. “How are they?”

 “Go to bed, Hawk. I’ll take care of them.” BJ’s tone is firm, and his voice is, if not light, at least dead-set on mother-henning Hawkeye into bed. “The sergeant’s worst off, but mostly they need food, bed, warmth.”

 “So do we all.” Came the dark reply.

 “Go.” BJ responded firmly, pushing at his waist.

 “Going.” Hawkeye said, faux meekly, wishing he could stop by the Swamp for a belt before bed. It’s a futile wish, but he wants it all the same.

 There’s an ache inside him, and it’s not just the ache of standing on his feet for two days, or not sleeping or not eating or not being warm. It’s not even the ache of being always afraid, which takes an awful lot of energy and leaves him as tightly wound as a spring at the end of a day.

 No, it’s the deep, deep down chill like when he was a boy, lost in the woods. There’s the heavy, cumbersome push of his boots through the crust of the snow, the numbness seeping in his arms and legs and creeping up towards his heart, the ache of the cold air against his eyes and deep in his ear drums, and the hollowness coming from inside him, asking a solitary question:

_Why?_

 *

 “Pierce, why are you standing in the doorway?”

“Had a hard day at the office, colonel.”

“Is that a question or a statement, Pierce?”

“Either, both, I don't know.”

“Hawkeye, what are you doing?”

 A silent gesticulation with the sandwich he was eating.

“I just don't want to get crumbs in your tent, colonel.”

“Thanks, Pierce. Now get inside before you freeze to death.”

“I'm from Maine, we’re a hardy bunch.”

“At five below zero? Even the lobsters would be frozen.” 

Potter’s objection to his retort was followed up by decisive action. In the next minute, he felt the colonel’s firm hand between his shoulder blades, the even pressure pushing him forward. He opens his mouth to say something but loses the words between his brain and mouth. All he wants to do is sleep. He’s not sure if he should be concerned about how intently he wants to sleep. He’s been up an awfully long time—double double digits.

And to be honest, he didn't even know why he was doing it, hanging around the colonel’s tent, eating his sandwich. It was just one peanut butter jelly sandwich after all, but Potter was a man of order and eating one crumby sandwich in his tent seemed almost like eating in a church. So, Hawkeye had swapped one hand in and out of his pockets and kept switching hands, so he could finish his sandwich before he went in to sleep.

He whacked his hand on the tent-frame, and swore under his breath. The back of his hand is numb, and it hurts twice as much as it should, the pain waking up the nerve endings in his hand.

“Easy, Pierce, I need those hands.” Potter chided him, pulling the door shut behind him. The older man brushed past him, the edge of his shoulder pushing Hawkeye further into the tent. He ought to be doing something, but all of his energy is going to his mouth at the moment.

 “Not as much as I do. Besides, I don’t even feel it anymore.”

“Why do I not find that reassuring?” Potter rumbled, taking off his hat and unbuttoning his parka. Hawkeye slumped down in the colonel’s chair, kicked his legs out and is halfway into some deep breathing and slow blinking when Potter pulls on his pajamas and bathrobe and gets into bed.

 “Pierce, get over here and join the herd.”

He’s missed something.

“Whatzat?” He muttered, sleepily, rolling his neck to one side. Someone ought to tell the Army about proper engineering for chairs, he thinks distantly, they haven’t gotten the hang of it.  The cold metal of the chair bites into the upper part of his shoulder blade, and is making his tail-bone send sharp pangs up his spine.

“I don’t trust my horse’s stall to strange men, Pierce, and you need a place to sleep, so get over here.” Potter sounded impatient, but he’s also not making much sense, so Hawkeye just ignored him.

“I’m fine here.” He waved a dismissive hand and prepared to go back to sleep. The colonel harrumphed, sounding awfully close, and then Potter’s pulling him out of the chair, tugging off his jacket, peeling his gloves off roughly, pushing him with sharp little taps towards the edge of his bed. He tries to help, tries to object, but the colonel’s pushing too fast for him to get a thought in edgewise.

 _Brain_ , he ordered, stop sputtering with cold and fatigue, _fire away_ , _fire anything, add fuel to the fire, hold your fire, play with fire, fight fire with fire, fire something—_

Hawkeye looked down and realized, abruptly, that Potter is unlacing his boots for him. He swayed, just a little, as if to bend down and help, but Potter’s already taken them off, and he’s been undressed as if he were a little boy again.

His body goes through the motions mechanically, undoing his fatigue buttons, pulling off his pants, putting his fatigues as neatly as he could on the foot of the bed. Army training is good for that much, at least.

There are three army blankets and one cavalry blanket on Potter’s bed, and the welcome warmth of another body beside his. He feels that this ought to be a harder decision than it is, but his logic has shut down to: yes-sleep, no-sleep, and the answer to that is really an easy one.

There are worse places to sleep in Korea. And so, he slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MASH sets up a really interesting quandary for itself in season 4, which is the question of Sherman Potter, MD, a man who has fought in three wars, is a career Army man (a colonel, no less, in charge of other men), and thinks war is terrible. Potter is a question MASH never successfully resolves, because they tend to dance around him, to either flanderize his character, or accentuate the parts that fit in with the plotline of the week. Why does he fight? Why does he stay?  
> The titles of this story and its chapters are taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam. The title of this series is taken from S7E24, "A Night at Rosie's," a show that's meant to be funny but leaves me melancholy.


	2. This Year I Slept and Woke With Pain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Here's to the New Year. May she be a damn sight better than the old one, and may we all be home before she's over.”
> 
> Basic MASH spoilers and speculation. Note: MASH’s timeline is unsolvable as usual. In this, I take the later-season approach that Potter & BJ arrive sometime in late 1950. Disturbing dreams, mild WWI imagery, violence, medical stuff. Tags to ‘The Bus.’

The steel bright bone-saw in his hand slices though the femur like a hot knife through butter.

It falls apart softly, with a straight, smooth cut. When he finishes sawing through the leg-bone, he picks up the leg with great reverence to transfer it to the silver serving dish at his elbow.

There ought to be blood. But the leg just sits there, like a lump of flesh, waiting behind the glass of a butcher’s case to be sold. Blood dissuades customers, so the meat must be clean and properly dressed.  

“Treat it kindly, it was a soldier, once, and brave.”

It’s his voice, but not his words. He could never sound so grave and dignified, full of pomp and circumstance.

Potter nodded, his Colonel’s eagle flashing under the surgical light from where it is pinned to his surgical cap. Beneath it, his steel blue eyes pierce and pass through Hawkeye, on their way to the distant fields of France. He held the platter chest-high and bore it away. There’s a sound like trumpets, playing a fanfare.

Enter the screaming.

Then, Hawkeye begins the surgery again, picking up the saw, holding the other thrashing leg down. There’s nothing wrong with the foot or the leg, but it will have to come off.

Above the knee or below? Above. That way it will look even.

“We need your leg, soldier.”

He doesn’t say it but hears himself say it all the same.

The flesh under his hand is hot, burning hot, and it feels like he’s being branded, burned with the outline of the other man’s flesh on his hands. The leg jerks, kicking, thumping against the metal surgical table with a _bang, bang, bang._

He can’t hold him down and saw at the same time.

“It’s just your leg—you’ll have a spare.” He pleaded.

This makes perfect sense.

_Bang Bang Bang_

The screaming rises in pitch, and comes to a ragged, sheer shriek that punches straight through his head. It’s distracts him, how shrill it is, and disrupts his concentration. The muscles in the leg beneath his hand twitch as he sets the saw, and with one firm stroke, the saw bites—

_BANG BANG BANG_

Scream _crescendos_.

“Damnit, can’t you shut that man up?” Hawkeye yells at BJ, never taking his eyes off his work. A slip of the saw and he might lose a finger. There’s no answer—has BJ left him here in the O.R. alone?

He turned his head to see, and then he makes a mistake: he looks down.

The white face, screaming, mouth open in terror and agony, the lips bitten ragged and bloody with pain, the straining cords of tendons at the sides of the neck, the staring, empty eyes, the sheen of tears streaking down over the laughter lines and crow’s feet—the face he knows almost as well as he knows his own.

“Dad—” his lips form the word, but his lungs are suddenly heavingly vacant. The bone saw clatters to the operating table.

His father’s hand, the dexterous and kind fingers of a well-loved general physician, rises inexorably off the operating table, the bone saw held firmly in his hand. Dad’s eyes meet his and hold them. They’re blue like the sea, dark with determination and love and tenderness and strength. He offers the saw, as if to say, take it.

Hawkeye helps him to sit up, and their heads bend together to look where his leg was.

“It’s just a spare, son.” Dad repeated to him, with calm composure. “If you need it—” and his eyes are inexpressibly kind, “take it, Ben.”

When Hawkeye just looks at him, his Dad wraps their hands together over the bone saw’s handle, leans over the table, and presses down.

For some reason, this makes perfect sense.

Then, the blood starts, and Hawkeye screams.

*

_BANGbang BANGbang BANGbang_

His heart ran a mile a minute in the instant it takes him to realize it’s a dream.

In the next, an elbow hits him, bruisingly hard, between his shoulder blade and spine, and his eyes snap open. Hawkeye rolled on his back, trying to forget the tang of a scream in the back of his throat, swallowing it back down.

_—the slick white of the bone next to the steel saw, the blue of his father’s eyes, the press of his Dad’s fingers on his, guiding the saw, cutting into his own leg—_

He can still hear the banging of that leg on the table, and realizes it's the crescendo of his heart.

Now that he’s awake and on edge, the relative awkwardness of his situation breaks over him. If it weren’t individually personal, to the matter of freezing to death, he’d be embarrassed. As it is, he stiffens a little, restlessly, but concedes that laying next to a man who bleeds heat like a furnace might be a lesser evil than losing his toes, or worse, his fingers.

Or a leg. The _meaty_ sound as he sawed through his leg.

He threw his hand over his eyes, trying to press out the images that still linger there. Flitter away, mind, think about women, songs to sing in the shower, his next prank on Frank, what the mess tent will try to kill them with next, BJ’s last letter from Peg, sleeping next to the Colonel—

Which is surprisingly warm and comfortable, not that he’s admitting that in the daylight—

The real mattress and clean sheets don’t hurt, either. Being a colonel has some perks, after all.

Potter rolls over, his shoulder pressing firmly into Hawkeye’s bicep, his arm splayed next to his hip.

“No, no, no,” Hawkeye mumbled, trying to decide whether being court-martialed for shoving a superior officer counts when you are sleeping in the same bed, or whether he would even push the colonel, who exudes dignified reserve like a second skin.

He’s sleeping next to Potter, not BJ, and he’s not curious to see how the colonel reacts to a pillow to the face. Potter barks before he looks sometimes, particularly when he’s on edge and grumpy from lack of sleep.

And he remembers with something not unlike fury how easily Potter had taken away his father’s leg—no, he corrected himself, it was just a soldier’s leg, any soldier’s leg. In the real world, here in Korea, they don’t get silver platters or fanfares, he thought bitterly, just a short ride and a shovel-worked hole down by the bend in the river.

Potter pushed further into next to him, curled up in the blankets, elbow in Hawkeye’s ribs. The sheets are crisp, the blankets are warm, the bed is real, and it would all be very comfortable thank you very much if the slightly, actually very uncomfortable situation of Potter’s being pressed into his side and making little whuffing noises weren’t true.

“Uh, colonel?” Hawkeye whispered, feeling the rigid shoulder grind into his ribs with little jerking motions. It’s odd because Army cots teach you pretty quickly to lie still when you sleep, they’re only two and half feet across, which doesn’t leave much room for moving. 

“ _Ja_.” It’s a guttural, soft word that sounded like a gunshot in the silence of the tent. The colonel’s breath heaved out like a horse’s, and he shuddered, again, with his whole body. Hawkeye realized with a start that he’d never thought the colonel, dignified to a fault, steady as a rock, would have nightmares. One other thing that’s catching in war time.

“Colonel.” Hawkeye said firmly, reaching across and shaking the shoulder that’s sticking into his ribs as best he can. “You’re asleep.” He shook again, harder this time, and felt the sudden jerk of the collarbone under his palm.

“P’rce?”

“Yo.” Next to you, Hawkeye thought, feel my ribs, colonel, sir?

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Potter said, rolling back onto his other side.

“Bad dreams, colonel?” Hawkeye asked the colonel’s back breezily, ignoring the question with the practiced skill of deliberate obtuseness.

“Nightmares? Just indigestion.” Potter replied guardedly, shuffling away. That light, easy tone of voice that the colonel has put on is a bluff, that much Hawkeye knew. And he knew the truth of his own senses, the restive movements of a man who isn’t sleeping well.

“Do you normally speak German when you have indigestion? You ought to see a doctor, or be in Ripley’s.” Hawkeye challenged, speaking fast, angry that the colonel thinks he ought to have some privacy, or demand his obvious lie to protect his dignity go unnoticed. War doesn’t allow those luxuries, and he ought to know.

Potter doesn’t answer, but his breath comes out in a quick huff, almost as if he were trying not to laugh. If he were less of a tough old bird, it might have sounded like a man trying not to break down and cry, Hawkeye thought with a sudden realization. But the colonel’s all bravado in sweat-soaked pajamas.

“Come on, colonel—” Hawkeye started, but whether his nerve would desert him hallway through his sentence, he never found out.

“Mind your own business, Pierce.” Potter’s sharp retort interrupted him. Potter was probably glaring at him, drawing his eyebrows together and drawing his authority up before him like the sharp edge of a sword. Or protection, Hawkeye thought, like a cloak. There aren’t many friends in a place like this for a colonel, in a unit where the buck stops with him.

“My business?” He said heatedly, his voice rising half an octave and several decibels, feeling his heart do a two-step, and he’s about to launch into a furious and towering tirade, fueled by a year’s worth of horrific injustices and petty indignities when he stopped, abruptly. It all seemed to boil down to one thing. “My business is legs.”

Legs, disconnected from their sovereign and vital parts by the cruelest and rudest way possible, discarded into sacks, being born down to the river to be buried in heaps and piles. Legs forgotten, legs dismembered, legs detached, legs useless, legs rotting, legs legs legs—do they have markers, he wonders, queerly, places to remember where their legs were?

_Severed by B.F. Pierce, Captain, MD, on 23 December 1950; Buried by James Shultz, PFC on 24 December 1950; never forgotten._

“Hawkeye?” Potter’s hand is grasping at his elbow, and his tone has softened into a resonant kindness, the end of the word lifting in a question. He’s willing to bend to help someone else, but not himself, because he’d rather hide his own wounds and lick them in private because of his dignity, and Hawkeye hates it, hates him, himself, this place, this war in a great, sudden burst of loathing—because he understands it and he doesn’t understand it, and that wears on him—

_the legs and the saws and the screaming_

He pulls his arm away roughly, and shifted over on his side, shutting his eyes to go back to sleep.

They’re lying stiffly next to each other, and Hawkeye’s too angry, too disgusted by his dream, to go back to sleep, but he also doesn’t want to talk about it, not with the colonel. They lay there for a moment, maybe ten, not talking, not sleeping, just two bodies rigidly next to each other in one full-sized bed.

Suddenly, the light goes on over their heads, and Potter’s getting out of bed and moving towards his desk. Hawkeye blinked against the light, determined to ignore this little tent-corner drama. If the colonel wants privacy, he’s got it.

“No good comes of going to bed angry, Pierce.” Potter said gruffly, pouring a low measure into two glasses. He turned, his face in a shadow, the furrow between his eyebrows and the braced set of his jaw the signs of how much this openness costs him. His eyes are a subdued blue, and intensely attentive to Hawkeye’s face, and he frowned, as if he saw something there that made him concerned.

He handed the glass to Hawkeye, and Hawkeye took it, acknowledging the overture for what it is, and swallowed a sip. It’s bourbon, and smooth as sin. He made as if to sit, and Hawkeye pulled up his legs for him. The navy blue cavalry blanket rippled under Potter’s weight, pulled tight over Hawkeye’s knees.

“Mind’s a fickle thing, Hawkeye,” Potter said, his voice soft, and seemingly sad. “Memory plays tricks on you. Sometimes you remember things as they were, and sometimes, sometimes you don’t.” There’s a heavy, almost hard emphasis to the way he says it. There’s more than that here. More to it than that, Hawkeye decided.

The colonel’s hands are pillowed in his lap, circling his glass, and his voice is steady, but there’s a flicker of something foreboding in his face, a twinge of muscle in his cheek, the tightness around his eyes. He’s hunched over his miniature horse-head pajama clad knees, looking off into the distance, determinedly not looking at Hawkeye.

“I saw men go mad with it. I never did.” Potter went silent for a moment, as if remembering, and then started to shake his head and stopped, looking down at his glass. His voice is hushed and raw. “Maybe I should have. Better men did—with the things we saw.”

He took a long swallow, knocking back his glass. He licked his lips, twice, almost pensively, and said again, evenly and more slowly, with a terrible patience,

“Maybe I should have.”

There’s a well-worn truth in the repetition of that admission, a burden of guilt for years and years and years. It’s such a frank thing to say that Hawkeye’s stunned out of himself for a moment. The colonel’s laid himself open to the bone, and all of it with kindness, because he thinks Hawkeye needs help.

Hawkeye held his breath, thought, and let it go.

“It was surgery.” He admitted quietly, feeling how steady his hands are, how steady his voice is. It’s all a lie, a lie that Potter knows.

“It went wrong. Was wrong.”  He corrected. That doesn’t catch the enormous horror of it, but it’s enough—his Dad, and their hands on the saw, and the legs—and Potter’s head turned, quickly, and there’s an answering gleam of the dread in the colonel’s cerulean eyes. He knows, Hawkeye realized, and breathed again.

Potter raised his glass as if to sip but puts it to his lips for a long slow minute, almost as if he’s forgotten it’s there, or it’s just a prop to distract him. It’s empty anyway, but maybe it’s about the ritual of it, the comforting burn that chases away the numbness of the night.

He gets angry that this is normal, then the anger burns away, defeated.

“This whole damn place is a nightmare, why shouldn’t I dream about it?” Hawkeye said, keeping his voice from breaking by sheer force of will, trying to fill up the empty space with his usual indignation, but mostly sounding despondent and more than a little exhausted.

Potter doesn’t try to tell him nightmares are normal—the result of stress, fatigue, unbearable hours, no privacy, no time to unwind or relax, living on a knife-edge for twelve months—he’s more honest than that, and he knows that Hawkeye knows that already. They are both doctors, just one with a bit more mileage than the other.

Hawkeye sipped again. The colonel doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at him, as if he too knows that there’s more to it than this. The colonel invites confidence, in his quiet deliberateness, the stillness of his strength. If Hawkeye’s like the sea, Potter’s as solid and unshakeable as the earth.

Maybe it’s the colonel sitting on the foot of the bed, maybe it’s his own need for release, but the words come out like an unburst flood, a jumble of left-over fear and terror and the faint edge of what might be hysteria.

“It was my Dad’s leg—and I was sawing it off like, like a piece of meat, _just like that_ , and it was _okay_. And I was okay with it. And I called him _soldier_.”

Then the colonel does something unforgivable.

“Ben—”

 “No, no, no, colonel, you don’t get to call me that with your commanding officer bullshit— tell me that the nightmares are normal—that what we do here is okay—that the army is right—it was my _father_ , for God’s sake.” His voice broke at last with the thick undercurrents of emotion he’s trying to suppress, and he looked down because he’s so furious, he’s almost panting. His undershirt sticks to him, the sweat is slick on his neck, and he ought to have more control than this, but his temper is on a knife-edge.

If he’d said anything else, but Potter had called him ‘Ben,’ as if he were his father, as if he had right to demand his affection, to accept his authority, his comfort. Because, of course, he doesn’t know, hasn’t had the time to find out, that Hawkeye doesn’t go by Ben, he hasn’t for years, except for his father, who remembers when Hawkeye was still a child and his mother was still alive and they were still a happy family together.

Ben’s a civilian, a boy in Crabapple Cove, with a beautiful, sweet mother and a protective, loving father, and an Irish setter named Whydah that follows at his heel from sunrise to sunset. Hawkeye’s this man who wound up in Korea, hurt badly by a woman he’d loved, who he would have married, a man left behind by his own best friend without a good-bye, who’s been drinking his own liver into submission. Hawkeye’s as far from Ben as he can get. Hawkeye doesn’t even know himself anymore, sometimes. And the colonel called him ‘Ben.’

Disgust with himself has transformed into fury at Potter in less than an instant. It all winds up together, like summer-dry tree stumps dumped in a bonfire, his anger at the army, his anger at the war, his anger at guns, bullets, healthy young men being mutilated, killed, his anger at being stuck here in this place.

And if Potter had gotten angry at him in return, that Hawkeye could take, marshal it into his own anger, turn it back on the war, the Army, Korea, but the colonel’s too perceptive for that, too wise to offer a platitude. Potter doesn’t say anything at all, just waits, in silence, attending. And that makes him angrier, lets the rein on his tongue loose that he’s kept bridled so far around the colonel, and it comes out sharp and tight and mean:

“Why are you here, anyway —didn’t you have enough already— _who the hell signs up for three wars?”_

Hawkeye expected a barked retaliation, a command to shut up, even a frosty silence. Potter’s got a temper and a short fuse.

But a hand appeared on his right knee, Potter’s hand, finely muscled, with lean fingers and slim knuckles, dusted with old white scars, the legacy of doing desperate surgery in makeshift places, the hands of an experienced, tough surgeon. It’s warm and firm, the palm resting on his patella, the fingers splayed over the insertion of the quadriceps. The hand stays there, just resting on his knee, and he can feel the strength of that hand, and the restraint.

Hawkeye took a ragged breath and looked up. The colonel’s looking at him with a look of such steadfast gentleness, that Hawkeye felt his gorge rising, with disquiet and a desire to throw-up. It’s disappointment, he thought, no, it’s more than that, it’s shame, he realized, he’s ashamed. If Potter had only gotten angry, but now, Hawkeye realized how terrible a question it was to ask, what an awful thing to demand. The colonel’s a good man, and he’s just asked an unforgiveable thing, a question he can’t take back.

He had let his anger override his principles, and now he’s attacked another man with words, not just attacked either, but with the intent to wound, to hurt. The colonel had made a mistake, yes, but only out of ignorance. Hawkeye had been out for blood, and repaying Potter’s kindness with injury. It’s revenge of the worst kind, on a decent man who’s just a stand-in punching bag for a bigger system.

He opened his mouth to say something, an apology, a retraction, an offer to go sleep with the colonel’s horse, but the colonel beats him to it.

“There was a boy.” Potter said, and then fell silent. “A German kid, probably eighteen or nineteen. Not much older than I was. If he’s still alive, he’d probably have grandchildren now.” He chuckled, a low dark sound in the back of his throat, and he shook his head.

They were so young, Hawkeye thought, feeling ancient at his twenty-seven. Probably both blue-eyed, Potter with dark hair, the German kid with blond. Hawkeye, caught in the beginning of the story despite himself, leaned forward, so he can hear better. Potter’s voice is very low, and he’s speaking huskily, half to himself, half to Hawkeye.

He’s only known the colonel for a few months, but he’s already realized that the colonel has two kinds of war stories. There are the ones that are full of fanciful detail, full of emotion, bravado even, the kind that get trotted out for nice young ladies or older aunts. It’s not that they aren’t true, of course, most of the time, but that they could belong to anyone, any soldier, a newspaper, a cartoon.

And then there’s the second sort, matter of fact, straightforward, the kind that’s bare and real, where the horror and terror and suffering all build up in the spaces between his words. The kind where Potter looks right through you, as if he’s just re-lived his own death, or someone else’s.

“It was WWI. Meuse-Argonne Offensive. We were both lost in the Argonne forest. I didn’t even know he was a German, we were so covered in mud. There was always mud, everywhere, thick, clinging mud. You’d currycomb a horse clean, or pick his hooves, and then turn around and have to do it all again.”

His voice caught, and then Potter cleared his throat, rolling his glass from hand to hand.

“We were lost.” He repeated, almost hoarsely, and Hawkeye feels the scene building, he can picture it, the colonel almost doesn’t need to narrate, his imagination has always been vivid and effortless, and he’s seen enough young soldiers here in Korea to imagine two young boys, lost, in oversized army uniforms, trudging through the walls of mud, shivering. The German boy’s a hair taller, but Potter is stouter, with the musculature of a farm-boy. 

They’d be hunched in on themselves, with those heavy wool uniforms plastered in thick, brown gelatinous sludge, pulled left and right in their strides by their own exhaustion. And rifles, hanging from their arms, or clenched to their shoulders, tin hats slouched to the side of their heads, bayonets belted tightly at their waists. Just like his own toy soldiers, but taller, younger.

 “The Argonne forest was as near a thing to hell as I’ve ever seen. Huge forest, with big, thick trees, some of them shot off or blown up ten or twelve feet from the ground, the whole thing a maze of branches and barbed wire, torn up with mines and shell craters, peppered with machine gun nests. There were German fortifications everywhere.”

“I had gotten lost from my outfit, and that day it was cold—drizzly—there was this thick fog coming down in the gloom, and my legs were numb to the hip, and I was so tired that if I stopped moving, I would’ve fallen asleep where I stood. There weren’t many trenches in the Argonne, but I spied a thick tree with big roots kind of like a cradle, and I just lay in it. Except there was someone already there.”

The German, Hawkeye thought, instinctively.

“Maybe I knew he was German; maybe I didn’t. But we just curled up together—like puppies, I suppose. It was like sleeping with my brothers.”

Potter turned to look at Hawkeye, gave a little quirk of a smile. It stood out in the tiredness of his face. Hawkeye didn’t smile back, but something in him warmed to that smile.

“I should have done something, he was a German, and that’s who we were fighting. Except I was cold and tired, and I didn’t want to have to kill anyone anymore. Not the boy who was sleeping curled up next to me, like my brother William had done in our bed at home.”

Hawkeye doesn’t want to think about that, the open admission that one man might have to kill another, but he wonders how many of the boys he’s treated have done the same.

Don’t think about it, he insisted, that’s not the end of the story. That can’t be the end of the story. Not the colonel with his kind hands and ready smiles and the way he speaks to every single one of the kids who come through this MASH, gruff and prickly but with a heart of gold underneath.

“When dawn came, we just walked away from each other there. That’s what I know. Sometimes I remember it the other way—that he never walked away.”

 _That I’d killed him_ , the colonel doesn’t say, but Hawkeye heard it all the same. Hawkeye doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t even know how to breathe. If he puts a word wrong here, the colonel will back off and shut down, and Hawkeye will have lost one more friend without a goodbye. He feels odd, and cold, and his fingers have gone numb because he’s clenching his glass too tightly.

He’s been lying in bed with a killer; _he was only a boy_ , _it was a war_ but that doesn’t make it right; it was a long time ago, but it was still murder. I’m sorry, Hawkeye thought, but that’s hopelessly inadequate, saying I understand is blatantly dishonest, wishing it were different is both impotent and unjust.

He used to be better at this, feeling the edges of other people’s feelings, the lay of a social minefield, but now he swings, fast and hard, between emotional extremes. He used to have words to say things, clever things, easy things, but now he finds he says what he means.

“Does it get better?” He asked, finally, finding the words sticking in his throat.

_Does the blood ever wash off?_

This pain, his words say but his mouth doesn’t, is like your pain. How did you bear it? Potter’s eyes are a pale gleam in his face, and unreadable, but he’s looking at Hawkeye, tracing down the lines in his face and the beginnings of the silver in his hair. It’s almost as though he is looking down the long, long run of years, to a better future that Hawkeye can’t see yet.

“It gets easier.” Potter pronounced, carefully, letting each word fall with the precision of a priest. “Not better, but easier.”

Some things you don’t forget, his gaze added, coming back to rest on Hawkeye’s face, you just live with them. Legs, Hawkeye thought, arms, the dead bodies going out in a trickle, the rushing stream of the wounded, the blood caked around his boots.

“I’m not sure that’s comforting.” Hawkeye admitted, feeling hollow with a strange mixture of fear and gratitude.

“Who said it was comforting?” The colonel said, sharply, his words terse and clipped, a whole lifetime of suffering condensed into one thought. “You get through it, Hawkeye.” He said, shortly, at last.

Hawkeye’s not sure that that is comforting either, but sometimes it isn’t about comfort, but about what’s true and what isn’t.

_It gets easier._

When Potter had said it, it sounded like a promise, or more, like a benediction. Like a man who had gotten through hell, and made it good, with kindness, diligence, loyalty. But when he thought it, it sounded like a noose around his neck, like it getting easier means giving up something of himself.

The silence between them ought to be awkward, as it stretches out and thins Potter’s words to the darkness of the Korean night, but Hawkeye finds it more honest, more familiar.  He knows something of Potter now, more than that he prefers straight blades and always triple-checks his prescriptions of morphine. He ought to think something about the colonel—be angry or upset or _something_ – about being in bed with a soldier, a man with blood on his hands, but he lets it go. It was a long time ago, he allowed.

Potter stood up, leaned over, and plucked Hawkeye’s glass from his hands, pushing down on Hawkeye’s shoulder with the slightest pressure. Hawkeye’s body followed it down.  It must be the bourbon which is making him feel so worn-out.

“Go back to sleep, Hawkeye.” He murmured, and then his hand is gone, and Hawkeye let the deep pull of uncertainty settle back behind his ribs.  He feels a great mixture of different things, gratitude, disgust, anger, comfort, frustration, fear, and _c’est la guerre_ , isn’t it, that inspired great deeds and great sins.

“Night, colonel.” He managed to say, shutting his eyes against the darkness. The dreams might come, but it gets easier. Before he slides back into sleep, he thought to himself, it might be true, but it isn’t any comfort.

If it gets any easier, he’ll go mad.

*

When Hawkeye wakes up, the blankets slide down to his shoulder as he sat up in a mussed collection of olive-drab, shaggy black and a long-drawn-out groan that ends in a jaw-popping yawn. He stretched with all the vertebrae in his back, feeling the pull all the way down to the end of his toes. The bed feels positively palatial with no one else in it.

“Were you a cat in another life? You’ll give yourself osteoarthritis.” Potter said, looking back at him in his shaving mirror and raising an eyebrow.

“Good morning to you, too, colonel.” Hawkeye replied, if not cheerily, at least flippantly, rubbing at his eye with the heel of his palm. He’s slept more deeply than he has in days, and he has the tautness of a dehydration headache to prove it.

He watched the colonel shaving a moment, the short sure strokes of the straight razor flashing over Potter’s cheek and jaw. Potter pulled the skin tight near his eye, shaved the final plane of his cheek, wiped the razor clean and studied his face in the mirror.

“Williams pulled through, we’ve got three evac buses coming in an hour, and we’ve got hot breakfast to look forward to.” Potter sounded positively sunny.

“And good night.” Hawkeye quipped, rolling his whole head in sarcastic disbelief in addition to his eyes. He debated lying back down on the bed but thought Potter might throw him out into the camp in his civvies, and he’d pushed the colonel enough for one day. And it was only—

“What time is it?” He mock-grumbled, leaning over to pull his pants on.

“Ten o’clock. And,” the colonel thundered, not to be interrupted, as an irregular bringer of jollity, working up a lather with his brush again, “there’s mail.”

“ _O_ ,” Hawkeye hummed, springing for his clothes, good news added onto a good mood, “ _tidings of comfort and joy—_ ” he sang, dressing as quickly as he could,

“You could shave—”

“No time, colonel, _O mail”_ Hawkeye replied, cheerfully, dismissing the suggestion. “ _Tidings of comfort and joy_ ,” He repeated, raising his volume and broadening his voice.  There was the teensiest bit of vibrato at the end. What could Hawkeye say, he was full of joy!

“Good morning to you, too, Hawkeye.” Potter repeated, chuckling at his sudden zeal.

Hawkeye waved a gloved hand behind him as he went out into the cold—first, he wanted to check Williams himself, then breakfast, then mail—or maybe mail first, then breakfast. Mail would give him courage to face the Mess firing line.

Abruptly, Hawkeye stopped inside the Post-OP door. It’s almost as if nothing had happened between the colonel and himself, but when he thought about it, when he had time to think about it, something had happened.

It’s only the aftermath of last night, he argued to himself, but knew that to be a lie.

“ _God rest ye merry, gentlemen,_ ” Hawkeye sang over to the patient in the bed nearest him, unhooking the chart from the end of thebed, blazoning on a smile over the unease in his heart. There’s a truce on, and there ought to be peace on earth at Christmastime. He’d make this good. “ _Let nothing you dismay—”_

Something had happened: he hadn’t met Potter’s eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MASH does a good job of making it seem like Potter spent the whole of WWI doing something other than fighting, by being in hospital (gassed and blinded after Chateau-Thierry,) lost and a POW in the Argonne (Meuse-Argonne offensive), or “hiding behind bread racks” (Battle of the Marne). For a show that tried to portray the ugly realities of war, they stepped away from actually confronting them face to face. But the 3rd Cavalry (the unit he mentions being in, in several episodes) was in the thick of the fighting for the AEF, and was honored for their gallantry and bravery. This is my attempt to reconcile that with who we know Potter to be. 
> 
> And, of course, of all the characters, Potter’s background is so inconsistent that the only way to come up with a coherent story is to pretend some episodes never happened. Other parts are made up whole-cloth, some are borrowed from other fics (particularly DestielsDestiny, thanks! and ‘Missing Hawk’ by Mariole (there are others who I can’t remember, gratia in absentia)).


	3. Sorrow Touch'd With Joy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawkeye never manages to ask the question he wants to ask, but gets an answer all the same.

 “Well, if I didn’t know any better, Hawkeye,” Fr. Mulcahy’s tenor drifted over Hawkeye’s shoulder as he leaned over the bedrail, “I’d say it was a miracle, a miracle of life.” He pronounced, giving that chipper little smile that lit up his face and his eyes with happiness. Not just happiness though—Hawkeye thought—joy.

“Say, Father,” Hawkeye asked, casually, putting down Williams’ wrist and writing down his pulse on his chart. Williams was young, fit, and scrappy, which meant he ought to pull through all right. The fact that he looked relaxed and pink in his sleep had reduced Hawkeye back to the business end of a pencil. “Can you answer a question for me?”

“If I can, Hawkeye,” Mulcahy said bemusedly, head inclined slightly to the left like an eager dog’s. “Although, I don’t really have an answer for everything, you know. My Boss is the one with all the answers.”

Hawkeye came around the bed and put his arm around Mulcahy’s shoulders, leaning in conspiratorially.

“Not here.  How about after dinner in my tent?”

“That sounds like quite a proposition, Hawkeye,” Able called from the end of the ward. Mulcahy blushed furiously beside him.

“Well,” Hawkeye said, thinking, in for a penny, in for a pound, “how about after dinner in _your_ tent?”

Mulcahy looked at him then, blue eyes bright with curiosity, as if sensing that this really isn’t just another joke. Hawkeye almost fidgeted, then caught himself. “It’s not anything important, really, Father, let’s just talk about—”

_the ethics of warfare, the morality of murder, our culpability_

“—that surprise at the Christmas party.”

“Alright, Hawkeye.” Father Mulcahy responded firmly, but then waved his finger under Hawkeye’s nose, “But no funny business?”

“Me? Surely, you jest, Father.”

“I don’t—"

“—He doesn’t,” chorused Able, Bigelow and several of more awake patients on the ward, who had been enjoying this little show.

“Thank you, thank you all,” Hawkeye made a grandiose bow, mock accepting their applause before strolling to the end of the post-op ward. “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

It’s funny, he thought, all those boys on the ward, and he never once thought of any single one of them as a murderer or wouldn’t meet their eyes. What was different about the colonel? He volunteered, Hawkeye insisted to himself, he choose to be here _. But so did some of these boys, they weren’t all drafted. What makes them different,_ that little voice in the back of his mind asked _? Why don’t they deserve your scorn?_

How was the colonel special? After all, a nasty part of his brain told him, you put a man under the knife without cause. He could have died. _You_ would have killed him. _There was a cause,_ Hawkeye argued with himself, _it saved a hundred men._

Oh, so that’s a defense for you, but not Potter?  Hypocrite.

 _He’s been in three wars,_ Hawkeye argued with himself. _Three! A soldier for three wars._

One, that little voice spoke up again, the one that sounded unerringly like a conscience, and maybe a little like BJ, a little like Fr. Mulcahy, a lot like his Dad. _One_ as a soldier. _Two_ as a doctor.

 _Still three,_ he thought stubbornly, knowing that he isn’t willing to understand. _He’s regular Army_.

Yes, he’s _such_ a regular Army mule that he lets you keep a still and walk around camp in your bathrobe, on duty or off. 

 _Shut up_ , Hawkeye grumbled to himself. _He’s still been in three wars._

*

There was a subzero wind that morning, and it felt sort of like December in Maine, even if it looked nothing like it. The ground was as hard as concrete under his feet, and he tried out a little Drummer Boy march as he went, modulating into a nice tap beat as his strides lengthened.

He sauntered to the mess tent from Post-Op with a little effort, trying to remind himself of his previous good mood. There was mail to look forward to, he had most of a full night’s sleep, and he had most of today and tomorrow to get drunk and miss his father and other family.

 _We wish you a Korean Christmas_ , he mock-sang to himself, then shook his head,

“Too many syllables,” he said to himself, grumbling. “Too much Korea. Not enough Christmas.”

BJ was parked at the table nearest the door, pushing a few leftover scrambled eggs around his tray with a listless fork. Hawkeye made a beeline for him, figuring that a few more minutes of aging might improve breakfast. It certainly couldn’t make it worse.

BJ looked drawn and tired, with the better part of a day’s scruff on his face, and if there was a smile somewhere in Korea, it was buried under a Santa-sized package of depression and size fourteen shoes.

“Good morning, sunshine.” Hawkeye exclaimed, “how was it?”

“A night shift shorter than the colonel’s night shirt.” BJ said, picking up a piece of egg on his fork and carrying it halfway to his mouth. It stopped, mid-air, and his mouth didn’t move. Well, that was a joke that demanded a smile.

“Ha ha.” Hawkeye mock-laughed, not that it was much of a laugh. “he’s switched to pajamas.”

“There goes the neighborhood.”

“What neighborhood?”

“Radar was here a few minutes ago with the mail,” BJ said, putting down his fork and sipping at his coffee. The food in the mess tent had that effect, not that the coffee was much better.  “He said ours might be in the afternoon delivery.”

“Does that mean he doesn’t have it yet?” Hawkeye said, aware of the edge in his voice. Mail could come infinitesimally slowly around here, and the thought of a Christmas without mail seemed unbearable. Trust the Army to lose the one thing that really kept his sanity in this place. The still just numbed the pain; at least mail relieved it for a time.

“Either that, or he hasn’t finished reading it yet.” BJ pointed out, swirling his coffee twice and putting it down with a thump.

“Christmas mail, very salacious.”  Hawkeye growled, picking up BJ’s coffee mug from the table and drinking it.

“Hey, get your own,” BJ scolded, snatching the coffee cup back.

“Yours is closer.” Hawkeye retorted, then scrubbed at his mouth. “And gross. Grosser than usual. What did you put in that?”

“I’m trying to convince the cook to brew it with gin.” BJ said, tapping at the edge of his cup with his fork. He had a little bit of a sarcastic smile to the edges of his mouth, but his eyes were distant.

“Oh, that’s what it is.” Hawkeye sputtered, rubbing his tongue against his teeth. “Tell the cook not to dilute it so much. Or to get the rats out first.”

“Didn’t you know, Hawk, that’s how the coffee gets so black?”

“We have dirty rats.” Hawkeye said, knowingly.

“In this tent, they have to clean them first. It’s the mess tent, after all.” BJ retorted, giving a smile, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it. Hawkeye debated calling him on how awful that pun was but decided to let it pass. It was Christmas.

“Look, Beej, can I ask you a question?’ Hawkeye said, and then immediately wished he hadn’t.

“You just did,” BJ pointed out.

“What do you think of the kids over in Post-Op?” Hawkeye said, lamely, knowing it was lame but not wanting to reveal the truth, not just yet, not until he’d even figured out what was really bothering him. What the colonel said, what he had said—he couldn’t repeat that even to BJ—Hawkeye couldn’t explain why he couldn’t meet the colonel’s eyes. _If anyone would understand_ , that little voice said again, _it’s Beej._  No, he couldn’t explain, Hawkeye thought, not even BJ. This was between Potter and himself.

“They’re fine. What are you really asking, Hawk?” BJ sounded tense, testy, his usual even keel off-balance. First Christmas in Korea is one cold kind of a wake-up call. It doubled Hawkeye’s resolve that it wasn’t fair to pile even more emotional turmoil on BJ, not when he was trying to live with being away from his wife and child for the first time at Christmas.

Funny, how he mixed metaphors—piling on emotional turmoil versus piling on emotional ballast—what’s the difference, he thought, but what you can stand to lose? No, he thought darkly, the difference is what you can hold onto.

“Forget I said anything,” Hawkeye said, and putting his hands on the table, stepped out to leave.

He hadn’t eaten breakfast, but that didn’t matter anyway. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, they were all equally terrible choices. If he were at home for Christmas, he would have French toast, real maple syrup from their Maine maples, milk from Ben Johnson’s dairy by the woodlot, Fred Sweet’s bacon, Mrs. Jacobs’ blueberry pie—a breakfast fit for kings—all the satisfying, gorgeous food of home.

It would probably kill him, after a year of Army food in Korea, but it would be worth it.

*

Margaret was walking towards him across the compound, and he eyed her curiously. She looked happy enough, what little of her face he could see under her olive drab parka and scarf, and he thought he’d risk it. She hadn’t got a home to miss, or feelings to hurt, he thought, and then regretted it. Hawkeye Pierce wasn’t usually that nasty. She was human, even if she was Regular Army.

“Margaret,” he called, “going to a merry Christmas in Korea?”

“Buzz off, Pierce,” the major replied, not giving him a sideways glance. Well, someone was chipper with morning duty.

“Breakfast is hot, and you, major, are ice cold. Is that any way to be on Christmas Eve?” Hawkeye chided, stepping in front of her path.

“Pierce, I’m not in the mood. Step aside, or I’ll show you an icicle with your name on it.”

“Friendly,” Hawkeye muttered under his breath. “Just answer me one question for a Christmas present.” He implored, deepening his tone and wagging his eyebrows the way the major hated. It was bound to get a rise out of her, he thought, then realized his hat covered the effect completely. Curse his eyebrows.

“If you go away, Pierce, I’ll answer anything.” Margaret retorted, her voice starting to enter the shrill register that her fellow Army officers were so familiar with.

“Anything?” He echoed, knowing exactly what question Margaret thought he was going to ask.

“—if it involves date, rendezvous or anything _unbecoming_ , Pierce so help you—”

“Major, what’s so good about the Army?”

“Pierce, are you trying to make a joke?” she asked, flatly, putting a hand on the mess tent door. She turned to face him squarely, her back to the Mess tent.

“If it is, it isn’t a very funny one,” he replied, ironically.

“Well,” Margaret said, looking at him funnily. The scrutiny made him shift on his numb feet.

“—guns, defeating Communists, and steel don’t count,” he said, backing off under her withering gaze.

“Roads, penicillin and desegregation.” Margaret replied, and pushed him aside with her elbow. “Now let me have breakfast.”

“Thanks,” he said shortly, finding himself startled. He’d never thought Margaret Houlihan, Major, would have a reasonable explanation for being in the U.S. Army. It sounded reasonable even to him.

That was definitely a mark of insanity. 

*

He swung by the post-op ward to do rounds, mostly because he didn’t have anything to do. Well, he corrected himself, there were plenty of things he could do, and some things he ought to be doing, and a thing he didn’t want to do at all.

Solution? Rounds.

Patients were distracting, even if they weren’t terribly exciting anymore. Williams was fine, better than fine, better than he ought to be for pushing death’s doorbell last night.

“Youth,” he said, feeling a sermon coming on. “Wasted on the young.”

Then, because he didn’t feel like it, he hummed a few bars of _I’ll Be Home for Christmas_.

“No, you’re right,” he said to the sleeping soldier to his left. “Bing Crosby really is too low for me.”

Crosby wasn’t too low for his dad to sing, draping holly over the mantelpiece, the gleam of the gold wedding ring he still wore shining in the candlelight from the Christmas tree. There would be the crackling of the firewood, the soft sound of the record spinning, Bing Crosby and his father singing together, the smell of an evergreen filling the whole house, cinnamon and nutmeg wafting in from the kitchen, candles burning in the windows and on the tree.

For a second, he basked the scene he imagined, filling up his nose and his eyes and his ears, enjoying it with the visceral sensation of a year’s worth of separation—smelling and seeing and hearing it in his head.

He stopped.

(He’d forgotten the sound of his father’s voice.)

He fled.

*

“Frank.”

“I’m not _doing_ anything—oh, it’s you Pierce. Putz off.”

“I just want to ask you a little question.”

“Yeah, I know where that goes, Mr. Smarty Pajamas.”

“This is a bathrobe, Frank.”

“So? It could be pajamas.”

“Alright, alright. I’ll go away. Just answer me a little question.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, Frank—you can go read your secretary’s mail in private.”

“It _is_ private. Was private. Howdya know that, anyway?”

“I inspect all explicit mail. It’s one of my duties as Captain Coitus of the 4077th.”

“Pierce! I thought you wanted to ask a question—not talk _dirty_ about the mail.”

 “I have to talk dirty about the mail, it’s one of my other duties—oh calm down, Frank, just one teensy-weensy little question.”

“Go on ask it and stop acting all shy. It’s un-American, and, it’s un-Christmas.”

“I think you mean _sly_ , Frank.”

“Pierce!”

“Alright, alright _—okay…_ what would you die for?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“No. Look, Frank. I honestly want to know what you’d be willing to die for.”

“Myself….Marg—my wife and children, of course. What do you want to know for, anyway? I knew it, this is some kind of cheat.”

“Something like that.”

“Go cheat somebody else then. _Meanie._ ”

“Oh, I will, Frank.”

“See if _I_ wish _you_ a Merry Christmas.”

“—Merry Christmas, Frank.”

///

“I left your mail in the Swamp, sir.”

“Radar, I was just there.”

“Well, when you were here not being there, sir, I just left here to put your mail there, so I could tell you here that your mail was there, sir.”

“…Never mind.”

“Sir?”

“Look, Radar, with all this here and there stuff, if you had to come up with one reason to be here on Christmas, what would it be?”

“That with all the bad stuff in this place, we might do something good. Ma always told me to do my best. And to treat people kind. You know, Hawkeye.”

“Yeah, I know, Radar. My dad used to say the same thing. He just didn’t tell me how to do it in a war.”

“Well, sir, I guess you just do it. Then you worry about how to do it later.”

*

“BJ, you’re drunk.”

“You sound surprised. It’s Christmas and I’m in Korea. Gin?”

“No thanks, I’m saving myself for rummy later.”

“Cute, Hawk.”

“A soldier has to have a hobby.”

“Your hobby is apparently asking questions today.”

“Oh, so you heard that.”

“Everybody heard that, Hawkeye. Go on—ask.”

“Did you ever think, Beej, uh, what might make you want to kill someone?”

“For Peg, Erin. To defend myself.”

“—did you even think about it?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for three awful, rotten, _terrible_ months here, Hawk. Pour me another drink, please.”

“Take it easy on that stuff, BJ, I’ve penciled you into my dance card for the party later.”

“If I get handsy, slap me. Then I can deck you and they can court-martial me and send me home.”  
  
“I promise I’ll be a perfect lady.”

*

The last skeins of a pink and purple sunset were passing through the sky as Hawkeye came out of the Swamp. If it weren’t for the far-off, distant drum-drum of artillery, and if he squinted, and imagined hard, he could see the olive-drab of the tens as an ugly green shade of conifer.

By the time he’d made it to his rendezvous in Fr. Mulcahy’s tent, he was wound tighter than a spring with all the answers rattling around his mind. He knocked harder than he meant and opened the door a half second before Mulcahy responded.

He came here to talk about Potter, about how a good man could be corrupted by a bad system, or not; how he could reconcile that Potter’s been a good man and a good soldier—and that means killing people—but what came out was the anguish of a question that he had buried somewhere deep in his guts since that official letter stamped Selective Service, U.S. Army had come to his door and drafted him.

“Why are we here, Father? Why are any of us here? What’s the point of it—us, being here?”

Mulcahy, sitting on his bed, reading some thick book, didn’t seem surprised by the words coming out of his mouth and didn’t move an inch, even when Hawkeye sat too closely next to him.

“Why is there something at all—rather than nothing?” Mulcahy said, reflectively, almost asking the question out loud to himself. Hawkeye didn’t understand what he was talking about it, but he continued softly and seriously, his eyes intent on Hawkeye. “I believe we’re here because God loves us.” Hawkeye could feel the almost instant burst of feverish energy coming over him.  He fidgeted, stalked to his feet, took two steps to the Father’s desk and back again.

That was a joke, it had to be. Otherwise, it was a contradiction he couldn’t take. There were kids _dying:_ big, tough, young American GIs who shouldn’t be here; little, beautiful Korean kids who ought to be playing ball, not playing in minefields; sweet, kind mothers; honest, hardworking fathers; there was a whole country being torn apart, and the people in it were dying—there were people who were dead or missing or blown to bits, there was Tommy—he cut that thought short mercilessly and said,

“Even here in Korea? This is a stink-hole of blood and suffering and pain and bomb-blown earth that goes under the pseudonym ‘hell’ that the Army dragged me to on pain of imprisonment. Because God _loves us_ —are you even listening to yourself? To _me_? To hell with—”

“—careful, Hawkeye.” Mulcahy interrupted, and there was more than a hint of steel in his soft voice. Hawkeye relented, realizing that he’d been about to say another thing he couldn’t take back.

“Sorry, Father,” he said, tamping down the explosive torrent of words building up somewhere in his esophagus.

“Do you think suffering somehow _ends_ at the 38th parallel?” Mulcahy asked, his face somewhere between chiding and empathetic.

“I think a lot of the suffering wouldn’t be here if we weren’t at the 38th parallel.”

“You didn’t answer the question, Hawkeye.”

“That’s not the question I’m asking, Father,” he said, feeling the color rising to his cheeks because he was lying to himself now, not just to Mulcahy.

“Isn’t it?”

Hawkeye opened his mouth, and Mulcahy just looked at him with those innocent, wise eyes.

“Isn’t it?” he repeated more insistently, more quietly.

“There would be a lot less suffering if we weren’t here, Father.”

Fr. Mulcahy didn’t say anything for a long moment; the light of his eyes looked like sunlight on the ocean from the east on a clear day, when spring has just come to the shores of Maine, clear light, thin but sharp, pale but distinct, not harsh but fierce, the enduring promise of spring reborn.

“Who are you to say that, Hawkeye? We all feel suffering and pain, and some people a great deal more than you do, and who are you to say that the good we do here isn’t worthwhile, that it doesn’t outweigh the bad? Are _you_ God?—Hawkeye,” Mulcahy said and stopped, reaching one hand up to take off his glasses. He pressed at his temple for a minute, as if in pain—there was a headache building there, Hawkeye could see it in the tightness of his jaw and the flexing of the _masseter_ muscle next to his ear—and then, spoke again, his voice earnest and quiet,

“If I can’t believe that goodness will come out of this, that God has allowed this evil, yes, _this evil_ of war and death so that He might turn it into goodness by His own grace, if I can’t believe it,” his voice trailed off for a minute, then he continued, voice growing stronger, more fervent.

“If I _don’t_ believe it, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t just lay down and shoot myself.” He took a quick, sharp breath, almost a gasp, then gathered himself.  “But if I can do some good, for these people here, even in the midst of all of this, at least I can pray to God that my life here has been meaningful—and I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear.”

It was not what he wanted to hear. He wanted Mulcahy to tell him that he was right to be unsettled by Potter, right to fight against the Army any way he could, right to tell this war to go to hell. It wasn’t that Mulcahy was telling him he was wrong exactly, either; it was just that the Father was standing at a point beyond him. And maybe, he thought with a dawning realization, Potter was also standing at a point beyond him. There was a distance to travel there in understanding, in being willing to listen to the colonel. _And to be changed,_ he thought, _and I’m not sure that I’m— I’m not sure about anything._

“I’m sorry,” Mulcahy said, looking down his book, suddenly meek and mild looking again. “Hawkeye, I shouldn’t have lost my temper with you.”

“No, you’re right, Father. I wasn’t listening.” Hawkeye replied, marveling that this docile and seemingly diminutive man had seemed as bright as a star and stern, as though he had been wrought out of bronze that had been worn by wind, rain and the remorseless onset of years, but looked more human and yet more sublime for it. In that moment, he had looked serene, if scarred, and Hawkeye had felt, looking at him, a widening—

“Hawkeye?” Mulcahy asked, seemingly concerned by his silence.

“Thank you, Father.” Hawkeye responded, gratefully.

He opened the door, intent on going. Then he stopped, turned on his heel,

“I left my money in my other pants. Would you remind me later, at the party, about the orphans?”

“Of course, Hawkeye.”

He didn’t hear it, but as the door swung shut behind him, Mulcahy began to pray, mouth barely moving, voice the smallest unheard thread of sound

“… _and also for thy son, Hawkeye, who is deeply troubled by this war…_ ”

*

“BJ was just here.” Potter said absentmindedly, reading the long letter he too had clearly received in the Christmas mail delivery today. It must have been from his wife. He pointed at the door without looking up. “Said he went to go find a coffee. His wife...”

“Peg—” Hawkeye supplied, still standing in the doorway. He could feel the cold drafting through the door.

“Sent an envelope of snapshots of his daughter, Erin. Cute kid. Not as cute as mine, of course.” The colonel looked up from his letter then, giving a grin that stretched halfway across his face. “None of them are ever as cute as yours, except your kids’ kids. You’ll learn that one of these days.”

“He’ll be crying in his gin all night,” Hawkeye grumbled, not really upset, but stung by the empathy he felt for BJ. By the time he got back to California, Erin might be done being a toddler altogether. It was not a distraction necessarily, but Hawkeye let it distract him for a long moment.

“I wanted to repay the drink last night.” Hawkeye said, lifting the silver flask from his outside parka pocket. The colonel waited a beat as Hawkeye stripped off his gloves and hat. He didn’t normally get nervous, but this was different. “And to apologize.”

“Right,” was all Potter said, carefully putting the letter down, getting up, and collecting two glasses from where they sat on his travel desk.  He held them steady while Hawkeye unscrewed the cover, tipping the flask over and pouring an inch of alcohol in the bottom of each glass. Potter sat back down his bed, sipped, and gave a look to Hawkeye as if to say, not bad.

“Take a pew, Pierce.” It wasn’t an order, although the colonel had plenty of different ways of ordering things. He had three different ordering voices for Hawkeye alone. “This is good, different but good.”

“Got a kick like a mule,” Hawkeye agreed, perching on the edge of Potter’s desk chair, taking a slow slip. “My Dad sent it to me in the Christmas mail. Neighbors of ours make it in the Cove.”

“So that’s where you got your moonshine habit.”

“Nope, that’s strictly a Korean thing.” Hawkeye waved his hand, indicating this tent, the camp, the front line no more than five miles off. The war.  Potter nodded. “Besides, anyone with a half decent knowledge of chemistry can do that. _This_ is called applejack.”

“Tastes a bit like calvados—Norman stuff—they do it with pears, too, over there.” Hawkeye watched Potter take a long swallow, enjoying the apple taste and smoothness of it.

“They make it by freezing a barrel of the fall cider over the long winter, used to be the only thing to drink in New England,” Hawkeye supplied, surprising himself with his own eagerness to put off his apology. Potter looped his fingers around his glass and cradled it. Hawkeye pulled the tin he’d been hiding under his arm, set it down on the desk next to him. “We always have it at Christmas time. A cask would show up on our doorstep, no questions asked,” he said, by way of explanation. Potter gave him a brisk look, _you’re stalling_.

“And you have not yet experienced the culinary delight which is the Pierce Hermit,” Hawkeye expanded gregariously, well aware that he was stalling, pulling off the lid of the tin and folding back the three layers of wax paper. “A cookie which is not _merely_ a cookie but made with enough molasses to keep for weeks on board a ship, rich with thick molasses and brown sugar taste and the spices of the Orient.” He kept his voice light, airy, as he held the tin out to Potter.

Even just pulling back the paper had the smell of molasses and nutmeg wafting through the air. The hermits nestled snugly in their wax paper, packed tightly in squares, dense, heavy, a luscious dark brown spotted with raisins.

“This another Christmas tradition?” Potter asked curiously, leaning over to pull a hermit out of the tin.

“Yeah, Dad would always make enough hermits to last all twelve days of Christmas,” Hawkeye agreed, watching him take a bite, tapping his fingers on the tin, before taking the plunge, “Colonel, about what I said last night.” Hawkeye took a breath, fumbled for a word, “It was—inexcusable. And I’m sorry.”

“Yep, it was.” Potter’s tone took on a warning edge, and he held the hermit in his hand, not looking at it, but not looking at Hawkeye either. “But understandable. I’m a part of the system that drafted you to this place. And I’m here to take the punches—”

“—General So-and-So is safe in Tokyo, gleefully signing more draft orders.” Hawkeye retorted, trying to make a joke but surprising himself by the bitter edge to his voice, wishing it were more difficult than this. Potter didn’t say anything, then shook his head as if to say, _I’ll forget you just said that_ and _stop trying to distract me, I know all the tricks._ The colonel’s silences were very expressive. Hawkeye just shrugged, took a hermit for something for his hands to do, offered the flask as if to re-fill Potter’s still full glass.

“Pierce,” the colonel sighed, “you make one hash of an apology for yourself.” Potter rested the hermit on top of his glass as he leaned backwards on his bed, continuing,

“Now, I’m willing to give you a lot of rein because you’ve been here a long spell and your work is first-rate, and you aren’t an idiot _most_ of the time, but these past few days seem to have been an exception.” He cocked an eyebrow Hawkeye’s way, and Hawkeye thought he recognized that look on the colonel’s face: it was a lot like one his father had, it must have been a paternal thing—so help me, Hawkeye Pierce, sit down and shut up. Hawkeye couldn’t help it, he took one look at that deadpan face and howled with laughter.

“You know, you’re right. No wonder I got stuck in this pit. Do you think I ought to go back out and do it again?” Hawkeye retorted, in between barks of laughter.

But his laughter tapered off because the colonel wasn’t laughing with him, and whatever else he was, Potter had an easy sense of humor. He wasn’t smiling, his face set in a deadpan expression that was no expression at all but looked like it had been carved out of stone, and then Potter let out a long, slow whistle, as if in admiration.

“Are you done?” was the only thing he said, tone as indifferent as if Hawkeye had just asked him for the time of day. Hawkeye took a sip of applejack, cleared his throat, and repeated himself,

“Look, colonel, I really am sorry.” And whether the colonel could hear earnestness in his voice or recognize his honesty, Potter’s face softened and he looked up, rolling his glass between his fingers. There was a hint of slyness on his hard-bitten face.

“I guess you can’t help being a bit of an ass, can you, Hawkeye?” Potter remarked, sounding almost fond.

“Genuine one-quarter jackass, right here.” Hawkeye stretched out his legs, smirked, and added, “but if Frank’s in the room, that rises to one-third parts jackass.”

“Burns does that to a man.” Potter said, taking a long, light sip of his glass, then cocked it in his hands, studying the amber surface of the alcohol.  “Course, every unit in the Army has a Burns—the only thing to do is pass him over to some other, unsuspecting outfit.”

“A terrific idea,” Hawkeye exclaimed, toasting the colonel with his glass, then continued, “except every medical unit in Korea already knows about the fink.”

“Well, it is a problem. I had a CO like Burns once, but he didn’t last long. Cracked up about the time we hit Normandy, had to ship him home in a straitjacket.”

“They didn’t have rubber rooms in those days?”

“They needed the rubber for more important things, like tires.” Potter deadpanned, then cracked a smile.

“Uh huh.” Hawkeye said. _This is how the wheels on the war go round and round, round and round, round and round.  
_

“Still,” the colonel said and paused, finishing the rest of his glass. He held it out, as if in question, and Hawkeye filled it up again. “It seems to me you’ve apologized, Pierce, buttered me up with cookies and a very fine grade of sauce, and yet you’re still here.”

“It’s all the Christmas spirit in me, Colonel.” Hawkeye temporized, adding a splash to his own glass. 

“Save that for the party tonight. But you seem like you want an answer to your question last night—not that I think you deserve one, or that you should have one.”

“I guess I don’t,” Hawkeye admitted, looking down at his boots. They needed to be cleaned badly; he could still see the reddish caked streaks of bloody mud dried on the edges of the soles. “But I guess I keep wondering _why_.”

Normally he’d be up and running off at the mouth, but the colonel’s gaze on the top of his head made him slow down and think carefully.  “I’ve asked everybody in this damn camp a different version—I asked Radar, I asked Margaret, I asked the Father, I asked _Frank,_ I even asked BJ what he thought he would kill for—”

Hawkeye looked up, caught the deep edges of a wince receding off Potter’s face. Potter held up a hand.

“Did you get an answer you could live with?” he asked.

“Did I get an answer? Yeah, I got an answer, but one I could live with—” the words were hanging in the air, and Hawkeye, for the first time since he had come into the colonel’s tent, looked up, met Potter’s gray blue eyes with his, and said, truthfully, “I don’t know.”

“Some questions you can’t answer, Pierce, some you shouldn’t.” It seemed inappropriate to press at Potter again in the light of day, but Hawkeye didn’t know what to do. He wanted to know, but he didn’t, he wished he didn’t understand, he wished he didn’t have to understand, but he did and he was here, and that was never going to go away.

He was here, but he wanted to be home, and there was a way to move there, even while being here, and Mulcahy had it, and he thought Potter had it, and he was still not sure he wanted to move, or to widen, or embrace the place where they were, but he was willing to listen.  He wasn’t willing to give himself up to this war—to surrender to it—let himself be taken in by it. But fighting it was hard, harder than he had ever thought, and he was tired.

Potter squinted, as if he was looking past him into the brightness of the sun, the boundaries of the earth, the front porch of a white farmhouse ten thousand miles away in Missouri. He looked old in that moment, a little worn around the edge; the tough vitality that normally animated him seemed dim, like Hawkeye could see the weight of the years pressing down in the lines on his face, the white in his hair.

“When I joined the army,” he started, his voice meditative, “I was a lot like Radar, you know.” He gave a short bark of laughter. “Really, I was. Maybe a bit taller, though.”

“I’d never been east of the Mississippi in my whole life, and the cavalry had beautiful horses—the kind you breed for riding, not farming—for running like the wind, jumping—the most beautiful horses I’d ever seen,” he laughed, sipping at his applejack, and sighed. It was a sigh full of regrets.

“I was a damn fool boy, Hawkeye, I don’t mind telling you that. But the Army was easier work than farming, and I loved taking care of the horses. Nobody really expected us to join the war—we hadn’t really been to war since 1861,” Potter said, fiddling with the button his sleeve. It was a curiously uncertain movement for a man who barked orders, sprang to action, and never seemed to have a qualm at anything he saw.

“You didn’t join the Army just for horses. I refuse to believe that,” Hawkeye pushed, trying to get at the heart of the matter.

“No,” Potter said heavily, fiddling with the middle button on his uniform shirt. “When I joined the Army, I got the first pair of new boots that I’d ever owned.” He shut his eyes briefly, as if against the light, and Hawkeye found that he wanted to avert his gaze, to give the colonel some privacy. It was hard to imagine, but then he could draw the parallels between Radar and the colonel. Poverty had a grasp, even reaching from childhood.

“I had come home that fall, in late 1914, and I was done with school. Maybe that’s hard to imagine for you, Pierce, but that’s the way it was. My education was done; it was time to become a farmer.” Potter shrugged, not uncomfortably, but with the well-worn ease of a long-held burden. “I wanted to go to college. My mother was a schoolteacher and had taught me; my uncle was a veterinarian with no children, and he would have helped to pay for it. But my father was a proud man—not hard, but proud—and he refused. My hopes were shattered.”

“What happened?”

“My mother would have talked it round eventually, I suppose, but I was headstrong—that doesn’t surprise you, Pierce. I joined the 1st Cavalry the next time recruiters came through town, in the spring. Then I didn’t see my family again until after the Great War.”

Did it fester all that time, the hurt between father and son, Hawkeye wondered, was it all about authority for Potter, imposing his will on other people underneath him? _Remember to listen, Pierce,_ he chided himself. _This is a man, a whole man, not a caricature for you to lampoon in front of you.  
_

“But you aren’t a boy anymore,” Hawkeye observed, tapping his hermit absently against his glass. The colonel looked at his door for a moment, the sudden sound of voices passing distracting them both, some of the enlisted men on their way to the mess tent, probably Graves and Service and someone else who Hawkeye didn’t know yet, a nameless, voiceless face in olive drab like all the rest. “You’ve got enough friends; you could be anywhere. Honolulu. Tokyo. None of us want to be here—but you could just call up a general and get out of here.”

“I don’t need to tell you, Pierce, that some things are more important than what you want. I swore an oath.”

“Yeah? I took an oath too: first, do no harm,” Hawkeye shot back, and then realized he was on his feet, looming over Potter.

“Sit down, Pierce, and _listen_ for once.” Potter said, and there was a tempered, real anger to his voice. “No one expected a second war. We went through hell on earth to keep that from happening. But what Germany did—what the Nazis did had to be stopped.” Potter’s face was shuttered, cold, as if thinking of something beyond even the reach of hot anger when he released a breath, rocked his glass between his fingers, and looked Hawkeye straight in the eye and said, “War is terrible, and anyone who says otherwise is a fool or a liar or both.”

“Or Burns.”

“Pierce.” Potter breathed it like an invective, and his composure came down like am iron curtain. He bit his words out: “Some men go to go war for good reasons; most don’t. Wanting to defend your home, that’s a right thing, Pierce. I saw some of what the Reds did, Chinese and Russian, and it was enough to make me think twice about being their allies. And the South Koreans want freedom and we promised that. Sometimes you have to fight. And sometimes you don’t.” The fury had died away and left Potter seemingly old, more than old, tired to the bone.

“This isn’t my home,” Hawkeye repeated to Potter, feeling that same tiredness of _old and worn-out,_ leaning back in the chair, the back of it the only thing keeping him from collapsing in on himself. “We’re halfway around the world from my home.”

“This is my third war, Hawkeye.” He shook himself and sighed. “What I did in the Great War...” he shifted, looking past Hawkeye. “I can’t undo that now. It’s on God’s mercy. I was a good soldier, but I’m a better doctor because of it. Serving my country is an honorable thing, and I serve it best when I see every single one of those boys as a son—each one our country, Hawkeye, each one. If I don’t save that, protect it, then there is no country, much less one worth saving.”

There was a tired truth in his face, the realization hard-won that he didn't want to die, but neither would he let another boy die for him. The realization of mortality meant the realization that each individual man in this war—enlisted, officer, South Korean, North Korean—was a being of singular existence, alive and preciously unique, and they all might die, and it was not his will to either accept or decline that death, but simply to acknowledge it.

Potter swung his legs off the bed and leaned forward until he was practically knee to knee with Hawkeye.

“How could I live with myself, Pierce, if I asked another boy to go to war for me?” Another Radar, another BJ, another Hawkeye, his eyes seemed to ask, a Henry Blake? Hawkeye flinched.

It wasn’t for him to confirm or deny the colonel’s motivation. Maybe all he had to do was accept the other man’s choice, to recognize that there might be something worthwhile in it. Because even as he would do anything to get home, Potter was here by choice because he was willing to help and wanted to serve.

“I haven’t seen Crabapple Cove, Maine, or home, or my father in a year. It’s been _a year_ ,” Hawkeye said steadily, keeping the choke of out his voice only with long practice.

“They told us the first war would be over by Christmas,” Potter said, looking at him, his eyes dark and seemingly eternal. “It was a lie then, too.”  Potter leaned back and kicked out his feet, their legs parallel against the floor. His boots were very shiny.

If the price of moving beyond here was accepting being here, Hawkeye couldn’t and wouldn’t pay it. He’d respect this man, listen to him, maybe even obey him when the chips were down, but he could never be like him. That was sacrificing something he wouldn’t sacrifice.

Somewhere it was snowing on the coast of Maine, the cold wind blowing at the windowpanes, and his father was sitting alone in an empty house, perhaps looking at his photograph on the mantel, perhaps simply looking off east to where he is.  Nothing could bring that back, nothing could replace it.

But Hawkeye looked across the drab tent at Potter, who had fought in wars on three continents, at the way the grey-blue of his eyes seemed to catch the dim light like stars in the shadows of this place.

If there were a way, Hawkeye thought—that nothing would be lost, that all the pain and grief and suffering might mean something—

It didn’t feel much like Christmas, that there was a hollow place here, a hollow place and a darkness of suffering. But Christmas was a beginning, a kind of a hard beginning, of something altogether wonderful—  
  
“I wish to God you didn’t know, Hawkeye, what this was like.”

“Thanks,” Hawkeye said with an unease he didn’t understand, then added, “me too.” He wished he had the courage to say that he wished the colonel didn’t know what it was like either, that war had become a habit he could take on and off.

“To peace,” Hawkeye murmured.

“To peace,” Potter responded, clinking his glass in a toast. Potter raised his glass again, and said, “May your sons never have to go to war.” Potter’s baritone was hoarse and soft and resonant.

“Amen.”

There was a truth in that one word, chorused together in two voices, Potter’s and his, which he couldn’t name.  The colonel was honest, more honest than Hawkeye was, but there was a matching honesty there. New England bred it in him, while war did the same for Potter, that telling the truth in the things that mattered—telling the truth—was to be free. He handed Potter the flask after pouring another measure for himself. There was a truth there too, a truth of what being here meant: that he would keep fighting the war against the war.

Outside, in the mess tent, the first party-goers were starting to sing.  Hawkeye toasted Potter with his glass.

“Hawkeye?”

“Only if you lead.”

“ _Silent night, holy night—”_

Would his father be singing those same words, sitting in the Pierce pew in the Congregational church, as old Mr. Wyatt went by and wished his boy Ben was safe and sound and home at Christmastime; would he be walking home, singing it quietly to himself, or at home, where his mother had sang them? Would he be singing them on an urgent call to Mrs Harding, expecting her first child and remembering a mother who had died in labor, straining to bring her own daughter into the world?

Death loomed over all of it, the hand of death even in still, calm little Crabapple Cove. He saw Mrs Harding’s face, Hannah, who had sat behind him three seats in school, white with fear and pain, glistening with sweat and strain and the earnest calm that rose when his father spoke, the resoluteness to keep going, for tiny, smooth little feet, with ten curling toes and soft half-moon toenails, a cushy ball and a round heel, all perfectly formed and flushed pink with life.

And his father’s hands moving with surety like a painter or a sculptor.  
  
And he saw their faces: Hannah’s, his father’s, the baby’s, in a tableau of great beauty: the strain, the worry, the heartache, the agony.

The labor of love; and Hawkeye understood. _  
_

“— _Sleep in heavenly peace—_ ”

There might be beginning after beginning after beginning in this war, but Hawkeye knew, knew it down to his bones, as he looked at Potter, singing strongly and with a surety, his glass resting against his chest, the swell of meaning in his face, that the only thing to go on was a little old-fashioned rebellion, and hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to [PrairieDawn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairieDawn/pseuds/PrairieDawn) and [pr0serpina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr0serpina) for both betaing and support. This owes inspiration to both Jacques Maritain and Martin Heidegger. 
> 
> I have finally finished this story, although there is more down the road for both Hawkeye and Potter and all the rest to question what they are doing in Korea. Whether their answers remain the same some two years from now and the end of this Korean war is another question. 
> 
> This story has been, at times, difficult to write, and I think I learned in the doing. Thank you for reading it, and I hope reading it has been worthwhile.


End file.
